Love

Shortlisted for the US National Book Award, translated fiction 2018
Winner of the US PEN Translation Prize 2019
Named the 6th best Norwegian book of the last 25 years in a prestigious critics’ vote in Dagbladet, 2006

Love is the story about Vibeke and Jon, mother and son, who have just moved to a small place in the north of Norway. It’s the day before Jon’s birthday, and a travelling carnival has come to the village. Jon goes out to sell lottery tickets for his sports club, and Vibeke is going to the library. From here on we follow the two individuals on their separate journeys through a cold winter’s night – while a sense of uneasiness grows.

Love illustrates how language builds its own reality, and thus how mother and son can live in completely separate worlds. This distance is found not only between human beings, but also within each individual. This novel shows how such distance may have fatal consequences.

Rights sold to

LanguageForeign publisher

AlbanianSkanderbeg

American EnglishArchipelago Books

ArabicSefsafa Culture & Publishing

AzeriAlatoran

British EnglishAnd Other Stories

CatalanEditorial Les Hores

Chinese (simplified)Shanghai Translation Publishing House

CroatianFidipid

CzechDoplnek

DanishAthene

DutchDe Geus

FaroeseSprotin

FinnishLike

FrenchLes Allusifs

GermanKarl Rauch Verlag

HindiArvind Kumar Publishers

HungarianScolar

ItalianPonte alle Grazie

KoreanNineteen Books

LatvianApgads Atena

MarathiA&A Book Trust

PolishSmak Slowa

RomanianEditura Univers

RussianText

SerbianStubovi Kulture

SloveneModrijan

SpanishDuomo ediciones

SwedishAlfabeta Bokförlag

TurkishAfricano

Contact agent

Henrik Francke

Additional info

Kjærlighet

1997

Forlaget Oktober

Fiction, Novel

111 pages

Reviews

“[A] haunting masterpiece … Ørstavik shifts from Vibeke to Jon with incredible dexterity, often jumping perspective from one paragraph to the next, and, as their seemingly mundane nights progress, a creeping sense of dread builds. The deceptively simple novel is slow-burning, placing each character into situations associated with horror—entering an unfamiliar house, accepting a ride from a stranger—and the result is a magnificent tale.”Publishers Weekly, Starred review

“Quite simply, exceptional… If this book is an indication of Orstavik’s talent, then translations of the rest of her work can’t come soon enough… [Love] is a short, suspenseful winter’s tale crafted in beautifully spare and precise prose. It can be read in a few hours but its singular effects haunt the reader for a long time afterward”The Minneapolis Star Tribune, US

“Love is a deep and vibrantly alive novel… beautifully devastating… This is not your typical love story but rather the sharp-edged account of a boy whose need for attention from his heedless mother is heartfelt and full of yearning”World Literature Today, US

“[I]n Love, the closeness of the perspectives, the cramming of them together, as if the mother and son are one person, and yet clearly not, feels less about narrative, and more about the limitations of love. We think we know another person, we feel settled in another person, and yet, perhaps every other consciousness is entirely a mystery. That’s the power of this particular book. The tiny emotional and atmospheric shifts are often barely perceptible, and yet they add up to much more.”Los Angeles Review of Books

“It’s all here: Loneliness, longing, self-doubt – and the desperate but never ceasing will to change something”Neue Züricher Zeitung, Switzerland

“A masterpiece of minimalist prose”Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany

“This book, this tiny story by Hanne Ørstavik, captivates you – and after you finish reading, it won’t let you go”Frankfurter Neue Presse, Germany

“Magnificent”Peter Urban-Halle, NZZ, Germany

“You can give it as a gift to anyone, and they will be absorbed”Aftenposten

“Ørstavik describes these tense hours with a fine feeling for language. The tone is quiet, the words believable, the story captivating and engaging without turning into a tear jerker about broken family ties.”Morgenbladet

”an extremely well-composed, linguistically precise, original, not to mention threatening story about the relationship between mother and child”Aftenposten

”Excellent writing… Ørstavik writes out these suspenseful hours with a fine-polished linguistic nose. The tone is quiet, the words are credible, the story is gripping and engaging without degenerating into a tear jerker about broken family ties”Morgenbladet

”The book is small in size, literary masterly and with a content that hits the reader right in the solar plexus”Bergens Tidende

“Love is about longings, loneliness and the fact that everybody is alone. Because of this, the title has an especially strong effect. It is a thoroughly prepared, quiet, but very, very sad little novel … Love is simply a good book”Adresseavisen

“With her book The Pastor one discovered Hanne Ørstavik, and the novel Love, recently released in French, confirms her talent”Livres Hebdo

“Hanne Ørstavik follows to people in parallel, illuminates their wondering and makes tension rise, page by page. The result is a terrifying novel which sends a chill down one’s spine, and leaves no one unaffected!”Madame Figaro

“In a few pages, that are reminiscent of a sort of fairy tale, with both an enchanting and a disturbing dimension, Hanne Ørstavik creates a touching novel of precise and relevant language. Laboriously, she describes how language builds its own reality, how mother and son live in separate worlds. A wonderful and poetic book about loneliness and the search for love.”La Gazette Nord-Pas de Calais

“Hanne Ørstavik pulls the reader along until the very end, leading us astray, and tricking us to imagine the continuation of events, before she takes the story in a different, though not more comforting direction.”La Croix

“As so often before, solemnity is a condition for sensitivity. Hanne Ørstavik has used this principle to perfection, and gives us a novel that is simple and subtle, meditative and gripping.”L’Humanité

“Love explores the insurmountable distance between people, the elementary impenetrability of them, and tells us about the difficulty of reading the signals of others. In short, dry sentences, Ørstavik relates all the postponed, the possibilities that hang over our lives.”Avant-critiques

“Hanne Ørstavik succeeds in describing every little thing her characters do, and lets us feel the pressure of a white, freezing, deadly world. The alternation between points of view, and the time perspective (one single night) gives this heartbreaking text a surprising density. (…) Love fortifies the extraordinary talent of this author (born 1969), which behind closed doors, without special effects, describes how loneliness and loss of communication interact and interplay.”Télérama, ***